


look at all that wasted space

by rkahks



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Mental Health Issues, more tags to be added soon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22439503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rkahks/pseuds/rkahks
Summary: "It’s just the two of us" and "We have to stick together" echo in her head, a painful truth that Chloe had closed her eyes to. (Indeed: 3 - 1 = 1 doesn’t add up.) Her tears are warm, tickly, and they help her realize she has a lot to pour out. Still, her already overheated heart needs to beat this another truth into her core yet: they are mother and daughter.(A character study of Chloe Price and her troubled relationship with her mother.)
Relationships: Chloe Price & Joyce Price, Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	look at all that wasted space

**Author's Note:**

> special thanks to [Munks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munks/pseuds/Munks) for soothing down my insecurities about this fic with only a, "YEAH. DYKES AND THIER MOM ISSUES. I GET IT DUDE..."

Peaceful, what remains of Arcadia Bay wakes up along with the sun.

There’s no hiding from the light, and the Two Whales Diner seems to know this; bathing in the sun, its steeled edges reflect it in all its splendor. Light stretches in as the sun moves in the sky, and the time will come when it will reach the bodies on the floor. It won’t be long: curiously, all the shutters are wide open and the rounded metal awnings from outer have fallen down.

Peering through the windows would be the only way for light to come in anyway. It can’t come from the front doors: the logo that used to be attached to the roofline has fallen down like it just slipped from the top, and now it rests, blocking the right entrance like the stranded whale that it is now. The left entrance is being blocked by a tipped RV.

Before the diner, on the street, lay all the debris, the splinters and the newspaper pages that only three days ago reported an unexpected snowfall and could have never anticipated this catastrophe. The diner signboard could, though, and did: in the storm, most of the neon-lightered letters went dull, and what once read a bright TWO WHALES DINER, now reads a crude DIE. As a harbinger of what came to happen.

The sun moves up in the blue; the world still has to go on after the tornado, just like it did after the death of Rachel Amber. With this lighting, this wreckage caused by the storm even looks serene, as if the tragedy of this town was a fate written by Mother Nature herself. Not a thought that any of the survivors will share in a few hours, though. Not David Madsen, who will soon obdurately stumble his way into the diner to face tragedy in the name of a faint hope, neither Chloe Price or Max Caulfield, who at that point will be driving miles and miles away without looking back for the same reason. 

In 2008, at the Two Whales, with Max and Dad: it’s unusually bright outside, and unusually bright inside, too. The rays of sunlight peer through the shutters, despite them being closed, and land on the table, on the floor tiles; on Max’s arm, when she hands Chloe the menu; on Mom’s apron, when she comes to take their orders; on Dad’s fork, when he steals a slice of bacon from Chloe’s plate. Especially on Dad’s face, when Chloe glares at him, expecting to see a guilty, yet goofy smile, but only seeing the light his face is reflecting instead. Not shadows and facial features, like on Max’s and Joyce’s faces, but light, shining bright and white from where it radiates. Chloe continues her eating.

Dad gives a grumble from the back of his throat, swallowing, delighting his pancakes, and it’s a really fucking weird sound. Would be embarrassing, weren’t both Chloe and Max already used to it. Dad’s the lamest, Chloe knows, but she still feels warm inside despite this, giggling. She looks closer, his face is still unidentifiable.

Mom takes a seat on the couch, as Chloe excuses herself from the table to go meet with Max upstairs. She crosses the hall side by side with Dad, and they deviate ways as she turns left to go up the stairs and he goes straight ahead to take his jacket from the hanger. He opens the door, enabling unending light to come in. It hurts Chloe’s eyes. Dad calls, “Bye sweetie, bye Joyce—”

She opens her eyes to nothing: to pure darkness, a perfect contrast to the blinding bright environment she was just in. Give a few seconds and she can work out the moonlight peering through her curtains and dimly illuminating her room. She’s in her room. She looks around, breathes in, thinks about what just happened— just to be impaled with the piercing realization that none of that actually happened. She breathes out as slowly as truth sinks in on her core: it’s dark, Max can’t be _upstairs_ and Dad went out that door to never come back.

On her mind, an echo: _Joyce_.

“Hey Mom.”

Mom gives Chloe a quick look and turns away to resume picking the ingredients out of the fridge, closing the door behind her after she’s done. “Thought you’d never get out of your room,” is the way she greets her. “What were you waiting for, a written invitation?”

“Heh.” Chloe chuckles and walks across the kitchen to go sit at the table, paying attention to the door to the backyard.

It’s bright outside. The curtains are wide open and the sunlight is coming in through the glass, resting on the floor, on the chairs and on the table. She can spot points of dust floating in the air and she can feel the heat radiating from where the light lands, but nothing unusual so far. It surely isn’t the surreal, blinding kind of light she saw in her dream last night. It’s a normal bright outside, and there’s just a normal amount of light in front of her. She still picks a seat in the shadows anyway.

“There you go,” Mom slips a plate of pancakes in front of Chloe and sits on the chair across from hers at the table. Chloe doesn’t miss the empty chair next to her mom’s by the sunlight, even if she’s rather used to it by now. “So, how did you sleep last night?”

“Just fine,” she mumbles through a mouthful of pancakes. An automatic answer, no addos.

“Chloe, you’re not a five-year-old. Swallow before you speak.”

Said Chloe inhales through her nose, handles her mother’s stern look, swallows her pancakes and then exhales sharply, turning her eyes away to somewhere else. “Okay, mom.”

She lands her eyes on the fridge door, spots the photos sticked on it. The photo count in this house had always been high and going up, half of the reason being having a father who loves taking pictures, and the other, having a photographer for a best friend. But there hasn’t been any more photos added to the count lately; the full reason being not having your father nor your photographer best friend around anymore.

Chloe tilts her head up, takes a closer look. Is there a picture missing?

“So, have you been seeing the counselor?”

“Uh,” she mumbles distractedly, turning her eyes away from the fridge. “What?”

“The counselor, Chloe. At Blackwell. Have you talked to him?”

“No? And I think it’s a woman.” Chloe tries to resume her eating, but even when she’s looking down she can sense Mom’s staring at her. She looks up to stare back. Again, defensively this time: “What?”

“Man or woman, don’t you think you could talk to someone?”

“No. I don’t have anything to talk about.” At least not to some school shrink, anyway. But Mom raises her eyebrows and Chloe is only left with a third, “ _What?”_ But, now, with a little bit of weariness, and a little hint of urgency.

“Nothing, Chloe.” Mom elucidates, taking a sip of her coffee. She goes on finishing her plate of pancakes. “Aren’t you gonna be late for school?”

So Chloe stands up and goes to the sink to leave her plate there. By the time she passes by the fridge, she gives a quick look, confirms: one picture that used to be there isn’t anymore. One of Dad.

Crossing the hall to the front door, another _déjà-vu_ from her dream; but as she looks up, there’s no jacket to be taken from the hanger. She can’t see anything that belonged to her dad around here, and, still, he’s in everything she looks. “Bye Mom,” Chloe calls, before going out the door. At least she doesn’t get blind this time when the sunlight reaches her eyes.

It’s not figurative when Chloe says it felt like the world was about to end when her Dad died. Realistically, genuinely, it has, and still is. Not the _world_ per se (“Life must go on,” is Mom’s motto now), but _her_ world— which doesn’t mean her _life_ , though, because she’s clearly still here, sleeping in the same bedroom, sitting at the same table for breakfast, walking around at the same places. Still living, only with a deep, gaping chasm inside of her instead, one that seems like will never mend. It’s only grown wider and swallowed Chloe’s bones whole in the process, making her collide within herself. She’s limp now.

Dad’s still present, now more than ever, if only because he’s not here. If he’s buried 8 feet under the ground and not around anymore, it doesn’t really matter: along with the emptiness that his absence brings, comes a heavy atmosphere in the house. Grief hangs in the air like a physical form that takes over all the space, stands in between Chloe and her Mother, and acts like a barrier they can’t cross.

There’s no refuge outside of home, either: it took BFF Max Caulfield a month to cut with the “I’m here for you” shit and vanish, up and go, to move far away and forget all about Chloe. It feels like a betrayal, and it _should_ , Chloe tells herself, because, unlike her late father, Max had the choice to “be there for her” as she said she would. But she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to, and Chloe’s is left behind a second time. Back to square one on going through the stages of loss again.

A whirlpool in her fucking life, is what Dad’s death caused. Just like in Max and Chloe’s pirate adventures, everything gets swept by it, goes round, comes round, out of Chloe’s control and straight to hell. It tastes bitter, weighs her down heavy. She wishes she could detach herself from it, knock it off. If things are to be like this, then all she’s gotta do is not care anymore— JUST GOTTA LET GO, she scrawls on her bedroom wall in a bold handwriting, not only her own resolution but also a reminder to move on. And still, here she is, making use of the token of her childhood to make metaphors about the impact her father’s death had on her life.

“Shit,” she hisses when her throat itches from the nicotine smoke.

The more you know: humans emerged from tropical environments over 80,000 years ago. So, when Homo Sapiens immigrated from the warm environments of Africa to leave for glamorous Paris, because not even apes can stand being stuck in the same place forever, they had to adapt to the cold weather, _morphologically_. Places with lower temperatures mean less exposure to sunlight, which means a decrease of the production of vitamin D in your body, which means having a weak immune system, weak muscles and weak bones. Among other things. And this is exactly why they developed lighter skin tones: by decreasing the production of melanin, the thingy that makes the skin darken, they increased the amount of sunlight to be absorbed in their bodies. Yeah, Science.

Anyway, all of this to say that humans have needed light and been attracted to the sun-warm ever since the world began.

At Blackwell, Chloe usually spends class hours hidden in the shadows, eyeing campus askance while placing a cigarette between her lips and dragging in. To blend in feels too much of a faint concept to her now. It started to be, she figures, since she became the Dead Dad Girl, for whatever fucking reasons. She’s pretty sure she’s not the first person ever to have her dad die, but apparently she’s the first to be affected by it so badly, that probably everyone in Arcadia knows about her and pities her. Small town problems? Os is it on her?

After the incident, Chloe remarked how much people aren’t ready to talk about death. She thought she was. You call her insensitive, but by the time her Dad died, Chloe was just starting to perceive death as not more than a natural phenomena: it is inevitable, happens to each and all living beings, is part of life. And, yeah, knowing that didn’t mean it would be any easier to accept that the people she loved and cared about would eventually be gone someday, — all the pain of the loss revealed itself when she had to feel it on physical levels — but she didn’t think it would appear to feel so foreign to other people.

They didn’t know what to say, started to speak softly. “I’m sorry that your Dad passed away,” they would offer. As if saying the word “death” would attract it or some shit. This tipped Chloe off. Do you think that it makes it easier to cope when you put it that way? That a euphemism really makes justice to the way it feels? He didn't pass away, he _died_. Don’t talk softly to me.

Because of that, she picked the fragments of her broken bones and tried to restructure herself, to be capable of standing up. It didn’t work; grief would still have to press her down for a few years. So she tried another way, from _outer_. That's how, just like what happens to arthropods, she went through an ecdysis and got herself a brand new exoskeleton— exo, not endo. A strong facade.

If being labelled as “disruptive, inconsistent and problematic” is what she’s got to do not to be the Dead Dad Girl anymore, so be it. Just not to have to take up their pity. (She wanted to lay out her struggles with her Dead’s death, but not like this.) Chloe stomps around boldly, skips classes and hides from the sunlight in the Smoking Spot now, hoping that, by denying this humanly instinct, she will, too, deny her identity as one of her peers. At this point, she’s already lost herself in this cause and effect debate, wondering whether she has frail bones because she avoids the sunlight or if she avoids the sunlight because she has frail bones.

She comes home from “school” one afternoon just to be apprised that Mom has known about her play-pretend all along.

Chloe isn’t startled, nor surprised. In fact, it’s only with half-apoplexy that she learns that from time to time the Principal likes to call the Price Household to catch up and know why she isn’t coming to classes. Oh, so her unconventional coping mechanisms aren’t ratified by the faculty, what a shock. She always knew she’d be found out eventually and it’d all go to shit. Sneaking around the parking lot knowing that at the next turn she can be caught by a guard is pretty much part of the thrill, like a primitive instinct. For what reasons would one put themselves at risk, if not to remind themselves they're here?

But that’s not a thing she could expect her mother to understand.

Mom’s voice is low and stern. They’re at the kitchen again, and as the atmosphere gets heavier, it starts to feel claustrophobic. Mom’s facing her, just a few feet away, and the countertop’s pressing against her legs. Chloe feels cornered. “I don’t know what’s happening to you, Chloe. You’re slipping, your grades are falling, and you—”

Their gazes meet and she doesn’t finish her sentence. From the way her lips are pressed and her brow furrowed, though, Chloe can easily hear the unsaid words in her head: _and you’re a fuck-up._

She wasn’t prepared for this. For nearly a year their discussions had never scaled to such heat, and Chloe had never felt more exposed to her own ache. It stings inside of her, like a spreading disease, and the symptoms show themselves as a knot on her throat and as her inability to hold her mother’s stares. She asks her not to shut her out, but this request bears too much weight for Chloe to carry: we’ve both been walking around these issues for all this time and now you expect me to simply lay them out to you that smoothly? The walls are closing in.

“Chloe, I know how much you miss your Dad. But—”

Chloe snaps. “Now you know? You just said you didn’t!”

At that, Mom gets taken aback. Chloe gets, too — for the fact that she lost her temper or for the way her voice cracked, she can’t decide.

The sun is starting to hide behind the mountains now and it’s getting darker in the kitchen, but no one switches the lights on. The silence is oppressing. It’s not one that Chloe would usually disregard as end-of-discussion and use as an exit cue to saunter off. It’s one that weighs her down and reinforces: “You won’t leave.” It stretches time so _meaning_ can sink into her. It exposes her to her own humiliation. For a moment, Chloe wishes they would go back to the loud voices and running heat, for as wearying the screaming can be, at least it is distracting.

Mom breathes in through her mouth, shakily. The few strips of light that the sun is still sending to their kitchen are the weaker, dimlier ones, so Chloe can barely see any sheen of a tear track across a cheek, only the motion of a wide expansion and then reduction of a silhouette’s chest, along with the sound of a heavy breath. Her heart sinks nevertheless.

“We can’t fight. It’s just the two of us,” Mom snuffles, vulnerable. Chloe’s already crying. “We have to stick together.”

 _It’s just the two of us_ and _We have to stick together_ echo in her head, a painful truth that Chloe had closed her eyes to. (Indeed: 3 - 1 = 1 doesn’t add up.) Her tears are warm, tickly, and they help her realize she has a lot to pour out. Still, her already overheated heart needs to beat this another truth into her core yet: we are mother and daughter, we are mother and daughter, we are mother and daughter.

Their sobs resonate through the kitchen walls for a while. Both of them static where they stand, three feet away from each other, they are rooted to the ground. As they both quiet down until not a trembling breath is heard, Chloe thinks, softly: _This is our most honest moment since Dad’s funeral._

They’re completely in the dark now, and Chloe’s not able to descry a thing. Mom’s voice’s nasally, but back to low. What she decides now is not open for question: “You’re going to see the counselor.”

When the lights are turned on, Mom’s back’s already turned to her, and they only see each other’s faces in the next morning. That night, Chloe dreams of a faceless Dad once again.

**Author's Note:**

> chapter title taken from 'alone / with you' by daughter, thanks for reading, i want you to know that i can accept zero criticism right now, you can find me on tumblr as [@shuarks](https://shuarks.tumblr.com) but i'll see you soon anyway if you just stick around here


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